In Vishnu Rao’s Own Words — from JYNM: “The High Performer Trap and the Cost of Excellence”

“Different does not mean wrong, and I am not alone.”

— Vishnu Rao

I looked at a photo of myself from three years ago recently, next to a photo of myself now. I look like I’ve aged ten years in that gap. I spent most of that time thinking I just had bad anxiety and depression. I was forty before I learned those were symptoms, not the whole story.

I’m a clarity strategist and storyteller, married to a therapist, and I spent years in advertising before moving into independent strategy work. I was diagnosed with AuDHD — autism plus ADHD — and OCPD at forty, after a workplace crisis finally forced the question nobody had asked before.

1. The Mask Breaks Eventually — Mine Broke at Work

Masking is easy as a kid, mimicking whatever’s rewarded around you. In adulthood there are too many competing models to imitate — it’s like a scene from The Twilight Zone where faces keep shifting and nothing is clear. Eventually the mask breaks, either through burnout or something catastrophic. I didn’t realize how much effort I’d been spending on it until after my diagnosis. What I’d always called ordinary tiredness turned out to be years of accumulated masking fatigue. What I thought was sleeping in on weekends was actually my brain shutting down from sheer boredom, not genuine rest.

2. Anxiety and Depression Were the Symptom, Not the Root

For years I was told anxiety and depression were the conditions themselves. My diagnosis reframed them as symptoms of undiagnosed executive dysfunction. I had an all-or-nothing relationship with big tasks — I could only see the distant summit, never the steps — which produced repeated panic spirals under deadline pressure that eventually generalized into chronic anxiety. I was also strongly non-confrontational, and I later realized I simply lacked the mental bandwidth to process conflict live, so I’d replay entire arguments silently in my head instead of ever actually having them.

3. The Body Keeps Score, Even When You Refuse to Read It

I ignored warning signs for years: sleep that functioned as emergency shutdown rather than recovery, Sunday-night dread producing literal cold sweats before Monday meetings — which I later understood wasn’t fear of being shouted at, it was exhaustion at repeating the prior week’s depletion all over again. Tension headaches, weight gain, visibly accelerated aging. The tipping point came after a workplace blow-up, when a founder who recognized the pattern personally connected me to a psychiatrist. A real clinical assessment — not an online quiz I could game to give the answer I wanted — got me the diagnosis, and eventually medication I’d feared for years would blunt my creativity. It didn’t.

4. “Don’t Be a Burden” Was the Script Keeping Me Isolated

I carried this internalized rule for years: you deserve to carry your own struggles rather than burden someone else with them. I think that script is a hallmark neurodivergent trait, and it kept me isolated far longer than it needed to. Most neurodivergent people I’ve met only recognized themselves after meeting another neurodivergent person and seeing their own reactions mirrored back at them. My advice to someone newly suspecting they’re neurodivergent isn’t “get tested immediately” — self-testing can be exploited, and labels dropped too casually can backfire. Find real community first. Find someone else who gets it.

Tools & Strategies

• Self-imposed artificial deadlines — manufacturing structure since freelance work removes the external office kind.
• Time-based client billing — allocating fixed hours per client to avoid over-investing in one relationship.
• Formal diagnostic assessment over self-testing — a clinician-guided evaluation instead of an online quiz I could game.
• Third-space peer support groups — informal, recurring meetups as an accessible entry point before or alongside formal diagnosis.

Every journey is almost 99% the same. We may have different stops, our sceneries might look different, but the tracks are all the same. The fact that your story is the same as someone else’s story is not a bad thing.

Listen to the full episode: youtube.com/watch?v=y3VHHvSCexM

Topics covered: #AuDHD #LateDiagnosis #Burnout #Masking #ADHDAtWork #Neurodivergence